Image zoom
Describing the central conflict in
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, between her titular diva and Chadwick Boseman’s ambitious trumpeter, star Viola Davistells EW that “Levee represents everything that is antithetical towards [Ma’s] belief system. He is representative of a new phase of music that will render her extinct, for lack of a better term. He is unruly and undisciplined. I think that makes her uneasy. She sees him sexually as a threat too, to women that she has in her life.”
Throughout the Netflix film (now streaming), an adaptation of the August Wilson play, Levee plots against his boss Ma Rainey (Davis), trying to get their white record producer to force his new arrangement of her song upon her, and making moves on her paramour Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige). Little does he know though that the Mother of the Blues always gets her way in the end.
The DePaulia
Lauren Coates, Staff Writer|December 21, 2020
It’s impossible to have any sort of discussion about Netflix’s new film “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” without acknowledging the untimely death of Hollywood superstar Chadwick Boseman, whose turn as “Levee” will be his final credit.
Boseman, of course, is most well known for his role as the Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and although it seemed to be a role he was born to play, the franchise’s immense popularity often overshadowed some of his other, more gripping performances, making it easy to forget just how capable of an actor Boseman was.
Ma Rainey s Black Bottom Is a Vibrant, Devastating Work of Art David Lee/NETFLIX
The hardships, repressed frustration, and vulnerabilities that come with suffocating under systemic oppression are ever-present in the work of the late, great playwright August Wilson. He intimately understood the experience of Black Americans; the tone and cadence, the mannerisms and use of AAVE (African-American vernacular) in his plays specify that his theatrical experiences are meant
for Black audiences. In
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the third of Wilson’s works to be adapted for the screen, rhythm and blues are the vehicle through which our characters deal with daily exposure to white supremacy.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
George C. Wolfe,
IN 1929, two years after the setting of
Ma Rainey
’s Black Bottom and about seven months after Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” made her last recordings, another stylish Southern blues singer the “Queen” of the genre cut a song with her new husband. On “When the Levee Breaks,” Memphis Minnie looses her guitar on Kansas Joe McCoy, who starts to sing:
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s going to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s going to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay
The Advocate about Rainey s unapologetic queerness, orgies, and power for the new Netflix film. December 21 2020 8:00 AM EST
“They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me / Sure got to prove it on me / Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men,” Ma Rainey declares in “Prove It on Me Blues.” That 1928 tune isn’t performed in
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the new film based on August Wilson’s 1982 play that premiered Friday on Netflix. But Viola Davis, who is deeply familiar with Wilson’s oeuvre she won an Oscar for her role in the 2016 film based on his play